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(What is a river but an open throat; what is water but a voice?)
What is magic but a change in the world? What is conjugation but a transformation, one thing into another? She runs; she ran; she will run again.
The river may conjugate everything it touches, but the willows translate its grammar into their growth, and hold it slow and steady in their bark.
the sweep of their twisted crowns, reminds you of something, or someone, you’ve lost—something, or someone, you would break the world to have again. Something, you might think, happened here, long, long ago; something, you might think, is on the cusp of happening again.
But that is the nature of grammar—it is always tense, like an instrument, aching for release, longing to transform present into past into future, is into was into will.
They called it Arcadia, the Beautiful Country, the Land Beyond, Antiquity. And if they sometimes meant things less pretty than those names suggested, well, there are always things lost in translation, and curious things gained.
What the town of Thistleford gained from its proximity to Faerie was obvious: prosperity, merriment, uncommonly good weather. What it lost was negligible—the cost of doing business.
Taste is a kind of language, and siblings speak it with a forked tongue. As entwined as Esther and Ysabel were, there came a point in their childhood where their interests diverged, and, like the Professors, they loved each other across the gap between them.
She couldn’t put words to the look on Rin’s face. She only knew, very sharply and deeply, that she wanted to go on being the cause of it.
Rin was of a people to whom time was a kind of instrument, distance a kind of music, and while she did not know how to play, they could meet in the Modal Lands without too much difficulty, and did, as often as they could.
“There are two ways to answer these riddles,” said Esther, drawing her hands back to gesture with them. “With the past, or with the future. We think of the cherry or the chicken as unchangeable things, and the song pokes at those assumptions. How is a cherry not a cherry? Well, when it’s a flower. How is a chicken not a chicken? Well, when it’s an egg. The song says, this thing you are used to, it has a past, and that past is part of it; what the cherry was before the cherry is part of the cherry. All right?” Rin nodded solemnly. “All right.” “But that’s only one set of answers,” said Esther,
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Most music is the result of some intimacy with an instrument. One wraps one’s mouth around a whistle and pours one’s breath into it; one all but lays one’s cheek against a violin; and skin to skin is holy drummer’s kiss. But a harp is played most like a lover: you learn to lean its body against your breast, find those places of deepest, stiffest tension with your hands and finger them into quivering release.
If the river has roots, it has branches, too; learn to climb them, and find your sister.
